Half Past Dead (2002, Steven Seagal) Sasha is polygraphed by Sonny, the big boss, then he goes back to stealing cars for Nick's chop shop. FBI agent Williams (Ivanova of Babylon 5) offers Nick a deal as she wants Sonny. Cue a big shoot out. Sasha flat-lines for a while but he ends up refurbishing Alcatraz with Nick as a bad place to put bad people. A guy called Lester (Det. Belker of Hill Street Blues) is about to be executed there for killing 5 govt. agents while stealing $200M in gold bars 17 years before.
   He's asking Sasha what it's like to be dead when scumbags parachute in to grab him. They are led by Don Johnson (not the Miami Tripe guy), who has Gulf War Syndrome and feels that he deserves the gold. The BGs' escape helicopter finds the lighthouse in fog by crashing in to it! Sasha starts a battle with the BGs and the convicts join in.
   Sasha tells Nick he's an undercover Fed and he wants to bust Sonny, who killed his wife. Sasha strolls off with Lester then offers to swap him for a federal judge, who came to the prison to watch Lester being fried in an electric chair. But Johnson scams him. So there's a helicopter chase.
   Johnson pushes the judge out of his chopper but Sasha sky-dives to rescue her, and Lester releases his inner suicide bomber and takes out Johnson's chopper. Lester has told Sasha where to find the gold. And Sasha gets to bust Sonny and get Nick out of gaol. Our TV ran out of bullets twice but we are able to fill it up during the adverts.

Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn (2012) Tom, our hero, is a cadet at the space academy. He has a brother in combat with aliens, which he thinks are just a bunch of farmers and fairly harmless, and a remote mother in the service. He's a bit of a rebel and he's given the option of a medical discharge because he's allergic to the stasis drug used in hyperspace travel.
   Then aliens attack and Tom and 3 other cadets are told by a robot soldier that they are the only survivors. At the academy? On the planet. They have to fight their way to an evac point. Tom's girlfriend is killed. He acts as a decoy to let the robot kill the aliens chasing them, and those left survive.

Hancock (2008, Will Smith) is a very good film. The eponymous lead character is the world's worst superhero. But he saves a PR guy when Ray gets stuck on a crossing, wrecking a train and the guy's car in the process, and Ray makes himself Hancock's image consultant out of gratitude. His wife is unimpressed by a gross superhero who breaks things.
   The city of L.A. sticks Hancock in gaol for the $9 million damage done while sorting out 3 bozos rampaging on a freeway, so he sticks a stroppy guy's head up another guy's ass. The crime rate soars and Ray persuades Hancock that he needs a uniform. Hancock is released to tackle a bank robbery, and he gets his first ovation for a restrained job. Just the head bad guy loses a hand as collateral damage.
   Hancock tells Ray how he got to be a superhero; 80 years ago. But Ray's blonde wife also has super powers! She tells Hancock she's his sister and they're immortal, being near him takes her powers away, and all the others like them died out. Mary freaks out and wrecks L.A. a bit. Then she tells Ray that Hancock is her estranged husband.
   The one-handed bad guy busts out of gaol and Hancock finds out that being near Mary really has cost him his super powers when he's shot and it nearly kills him. Mary is also shot by the BGs and dies. Ray cuts off the HBG's other hand. Hancock then uncroaks Mary and leaves town after putting Ray's charity symbol on the Moon.

Hands of a Murderer (1990) is a TV film which features the Equalizer (Edward Woodward) as Sherlock Holmes, Magnum's butler as Dr. Watson, Superintendent Dalziel as Colonel Booth, the sinister pre-MI5 bloke and Anthony Andrews as a pleasingly lizard-like Professor Moriarty.
   On 1900/04/12, the Professor escapes from the gallows at Newgate prison and Sherlock Holmes takes a pop at the inept Inspector Lestrade. Mycroft Holmes tries to get his brother to work with Col. Booth, the head of security, to avert a war. Holmes turns down the chance to plug a leak from Mycroft's office.
   The leak is being hypnotized by Moriarty's girlfriend. Mr. Stubb strolls off with a coded document and Moriarty, in the pay of a Prussian master spy, kidnaps a surprisingly skinny Mycroft to get the key for the cypher. Mycroft bamboozles the girlfriend and lays a trap for Stubbs, the safe-cracker. So Moriarty calls on Holmes to exchange threats.
   The girlfriend gets the secret from Mycroft eventually and Watson sets Holmes on the right track. Col. Booth gives himself away as a bad guy. The police invade Moriarty's very elegant den but he gets away and Holmes is blown up.
   No, it's all a trick to get Moriarty to the funeral for a chase in carriages. Moriarty goes into the river with his girlfriend but the bodies are never found. And Holmes discovers that his biggest fan is none other than Queen Victoria.

The Hands of Orlac (1924) His hands are all-important to both concert pianist Paul Orlac and his erotomaniac wife. Returning from a performance, he is injured in a terrible train crash. His surgeon repair a skull fracture, and also gives him a double hand transplant. Orlac does not know the source of his hands until he receives a malicious note telling him that they came from a freshly guillotined killer!
   The over-imaginative Orlac slips into the delusion that the hands are taking him over and vows never to touch another human; to the dismay of his wife. The Orlacs slide deeper into debt and Paul's evil father, who hates him, refuses to help. Then the father is murdered; by the killer whose hands Orlac acquired, according to the fingerprints and the murder weapon!
   A blackmailer demands one-million francs for his silence. He's the killer, who had his head sewn back on by the assistant of the surgeon who gave Orlac the killer's hands. The killer now has a pair of prosthetic limbs! Orlac's wife persuades him to go to the authorities. Orlac sees his name written on an arrest warrant. Then follows a conclusion as startling as the ending of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Hard Rain (1998) is an extremely wet film set in a town near a dam, which is in danger of collapsing. The place has been evacuated, and that includes the cash in the bank. The armoured truck crewed by Tom and his Uncle Charlie gets stuck, thieves turn up to rob it, Uncle Charlie is killed and Tom hides $3 million in the graveyard. The thieves steal boats and jet-skis to chase Tom in the flooded town.
   Tom ends up locked in a cell at the sheriff's office. Luckily the lady doing stained glass windows for the church, Karen, rescues him just after the water reaches the roof of his cell! They end up in the home of a pair of crazy old coots with guns. The thieves catch up with Tom again and he finds that Uncle Charlie was in league with them.
   Tom has to take the thieves to the money; but he finds it gone. The sheriff is out of a job after losing an election, he sees the cash as a leaving bonus and he and his allies wipe out most of the bad guys. They also try to exterminate Tom, Karen and the head thief. The old dam collapses and there's lots of shooting, in which the sheriff gets his. And the head thief is allowed to escape with one bag of cash.

Hard Target (1993) Down South, there's an outfit scaring up ex-military derelicts for rich people to hunt. The daughter of one of them (her out of Witchblade with the eyebrows) goes looking for her dad, whom she's not seen for 20 years after her parent divorced, in New Orleans. Jean-Claude van Damme saves her from being robbed, and worse, and offers to find her father for a fee. The police come up with a body and van Damme proves it was murder.
   The gang becomes interested in the Muscles from Brussels as a target. They wipe out their bent pathologist, who is being harassed by a lady detective, and another derelict gets to be the subject of the last hunt in New Orleans. The client ends up dead and the prey is shot down in a street full of people.
   The gang writes off their recruiting agent and the cop next. The Muscles takes out some of the stooges, then takes a ride on a freight train with his employer. The head bad guy (Lance Hendriks) takes a gang of hunters (at $750K a head) into the bayou after them. The Muscles' bootlegger uncle joins in, and blows up his home and distilling operation to take out some stooges.
   The Muscles is chased by helicopters and motorbikes, and ends up in an old works full of carnival stuff and flammable liquids. Lots of shooting and explosions. The uncle and the young lady join in and the HBG gets a grenade down his pants!

Hard To Kill (1990, Steven Segal) 1983 in L.A. Someone is hiring gangsters to kill a senator, undercover cop Mason Storm gets some film and audio then he's chased away. Dirty cops shoot up his home, taking out his wife but not his kid, and plant cash & drugs. Storm dies for a while in the hospital and O'Malley, a lieutenant from IAD, decides he should stay dead officially.
   Storm comes out of a coma in 1990 with a big beard. A scumbag killer shows up but he's able to escape with help from a nurse, who stashes him in her house-sitting job. Storm trains himself into a one-man wrecking crew. O'Malley tells Storm his kid is still alive. Wise guys follow the nurse. O'Malley tells Storm he quit the job when bad guys ran his mother off the road.
   Storm realizes that a Senator Trent his his mystery voice. Bent cops shoot the house-sit to bits. Storm invades his old home to recover his camera. The bent cops are bugging everything and they find out that Storm's kid is with O'Malley.
   Storm runs from the bent cops. They take out O'Malley but Storm gets the kid. Storm calls on the senator at his mansion and takes out his goons. Then he has the senator busted instead of killing him as that would be a worse fate.

The Heat (2013) At an FBI bust, the blokes with the dog thinks the place is clean. So the sassy female agent, Sarah, finds the drugs and a stash of guns. And there's an appallingly fat and foul-mouthed lady detective; Mullins, in Boston. Sarah upsets Mullins by questioning one of her perps. Work together because of Mullins' local knowledge or forget a promotion, Sarah is told. The women tangle with an albino DEA agent, who looks as evil as shit, and his sidekick. They try to shove the ladies aside. Fat chance.
   Natch, the ladies upset the boss cops and Feds at least as much as the BGs, who turn explosive. Mullins has to evacuate her horrible family to safety are her horrible brothers are minor drug dealers. One of the brothers comes unstuck and ends up in hospital, so she breaks up the partnership. Sarah is told to go back to New York. Fat chance.
   Sarah becomes as foul-mouthed as the cop. The ladies, a.k.a. F-ing Heat, point guns and knock down doors in search of Larkin, the mysterious drug HBG. The more BGs they kill, the more crawl out of the woodwork. One of the DEA assholes is working with Larkin, the drug bad guy? It's not the albino, who is shot by his sidekck; who is Larkin. Larkin then heads to the hospital to kill the cop's brother, so Sarah shoots him in the dick; something which she had seen Mullins threaten to do but with an empty gun. Only Sarah's wasn't.

Hellboy (2004) A comic superhero on film. A Nazi in an iron mask opened a portal to the 7 Gods of Chaos, Yank soldiers blew everything up but not before a little red demon came through. 60 years on, Hellboy was still barely out of his demon teens, his mentor had cancer and HB was killing monsters and wrecking lots of museum exhibits in the process.
   The Nazi revived Rasputin as a demon and HB had a girlfriend, Liz, a fire-starter. Agent Myers was assigned to HB and they didn't get on. HB killed a monster in the subway, but only after it left a loada little monsters there. Rasputin had the mentor killed as HB was brooding about Myers getting pally with Liz.
   In Russia, HB revived a corpse of an Ivan in a graveyard and descended into the tunnels below to see off the Nazi who killed his "father". Liz blasted the gang of monsters but the Rasputin gang captured HB, Liz & Myers. HB refused to open a portal for Rasputin. A monster burst out of Rasputin and grew to the size of a skyscraper. But HB fed it a grenade belt and the world was saved.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) At Xmas 1955, 11 years after he was discovered "off the coast of Scotland", Hellboy gets a bedtime story about a golden army, a divided crown and a pact between elves and humans. In the present, the elf prince invades an auction in Manhatten to reclaim part of the crown, which controls the golden army.
   Red, the Hellman, keeps upsetting the boss of the US Dept. of Weirdness by getting himself on UTube. The teams are attacked by bone-eating bugs when they rush to the auction. Firegirl sees them off and Red falls out of a window onto a police car, so lots of photos.
   The elf prince kills his father for his part of the crown, his twin sister runs away with the third part of the crown and the Dept. gets a new boss: a German weirdo in an old-style diving suit. There's a huge battle in the Troll Market under Brooklyn Bridge. The prince unleashes the Jumping Bean of Death but Red slays it.
   Everyone heads for the Giant's Causeway, which is where the golden army is parked. The prince reassembles the crown and has a battle with Red. Hellboy kicks the prince's ass and takes the crown. Then the prince's sister stabs herself and kills both of them, to Aquaman's dismay. Firegirl melts the crown, and that's it for the army. Then Hellboy, Firegirl and Aquaman quit the Dept. of Weirdness. And so does the boss in the diving suit.

Hellcats of the Navy (1957, Ronald & Mrs. Reagan) Our hero is a submarine commander, who had to leave a diver behind on a mission to get a new Jap mine and really upsets his XO. The divorcee Capt. Raygun was after was having a non-romantic interlude with the dead diver, so the captain had to boot her into touch.
   A raiding party led by the XO into Jap territory turned into a shambles but the crippled sub followed a Jap freighter through a minefield and mapped the channel. Then the sub was zapped by a Jap sub and just a small group of Americans was rescued.
   Cap'n Raygun was cleared by a board of inquiry and the XO got the hump even more when he found that the captain didn't think he was fit for command. Then it was off to the Sea of Japan through the minefield for a Big Show. The XO had to choose between the captain and the crew, and got it right. Then the captain was rescued and he'd decided that the XO was ready for his own command.

Hell's Rain (2007) Loadsa meteorites are heading for North America. One hits the small town where the lady mayor is haunted by visions of her dead son so she's planning to move to Chicago. When more meteorites hit, the mayor forces her gloomy doctor husband back to work in the ER. There are zillions more meteorites on the way, and the town's power plant is taken out.
   Highway 40 is cut so everyone is stuck in the town in the Colorado mountains. The mayor talks strikers back to work to save her daughter from a gas leak at her place of work; but she's skiving off with her boyfriend, who ends up pinned down by a tree. The rocks are bits of a single meteorite, which will go off like an atom bomb if it hits!
   The mayor goes on the radio to tell everyone they have 35 minutes left. A promised rescue helicopter for 10 people is cancelled because the town isn't important enough. But the big bang turns out to be a phut. So everyone survives, the strikers get their contract and the mayor is re-elected and doesn't go to Chicago.

Hercules and the Lost Kingdom (1994) Kevin Sorbo plays the son of Zeus and a mortal mother. He gets a summons to Troy and collects a girl who's about to be sacrificed, and a slave who won't take "Get lost!" for an answer, along the way.
   The girl turns out to be the daughter of the king of Troy and she should have been sacrificed on Hera's orders. Sinister figures are trying to kill the princess, and she & Herc have to survive being swallowed by the Loch Ness monster on the way to Troy.
   The people of Troy have lost their city and they're living in the woods. The king croaks after being reunited with his daughter. Herc leads an assault force through a secret tunnel, and they have to fight the masked warriors, which deflate when killed.
   Meanwhile, the bad guys try to sacrifice the princess, Hercules does battle with their leader, the princess is saved and the Trojans get their city back. Hooray!

Hercules In New York (1969) is Arnold Strong's first film [he's b.k.a. Arnold Schwarzenberger] Hercules is blasted off Mount Olympus by Zeus for being cheeky. He lands in the sea and he's hauled aboard by a ship heading for New York. There, he hooks up with a lowlife pretzel seller and a university professor and his daughter. Herc goes into the grappling game and defies Zeus when the head God orders him home again.
   Zeus sends Nemesis after Herc and Juno tells her to slip Herc a potion which will take away his divine strength. Meanwhile, mobsters have taken over Herc's contract and Pluto is betting that he will lose his next match, which turns out to be a weight-lifting contest with Monstro the Magnificent.
   Herc finds a chariot to pursue the mobsters, who are chasing the professor and his daughter. The wheels come off the chariot. Atlas and Samson sneak down to New York to help out. Herc goes home from the top of the Empire State Building and Zeus heads down to grown level for a while.

Hero (2002, English sub-titles) Jet Li plays a Chinese 'Man With No Name' in the 7th Century, at a time when the Qin kingdom had not yet swallowed up its neighbours to create a Chinese empire. Mr. Nameless got to meet the Qin king on the strength of having seen off 3 assassins. But his story unravelled and the king decided that Mr. Nameless was there as an assassin.
   The tale of quests for revenge reconsidered in the light of the good of the country is full of leaping about and martial-arts battles, and colour co-ordinated tableau as stories unfold and layers of truth emerge. There's a cast of thousands at times and the special effects are very well done. 4 stars and well worth it!

Hero and The Terror (1988) 2 dozy cops strolled into the lair of a crazy killer without calling for back-up and Danny O'Brien (Chuck Norris) barely survived an encounter with The Terror. The newspapers called him The Hero and Simon Moon ended up in a looney bin. 3 years later, Danny had got his shrink pregnant after 6 months' therapy and she was moving in with him (but marriage off the list).
   Surprise! The Terror escaped from the bin and drove his getaway vehicle through a fence and over a 400 foot cliff into the Snake River. He was written off as dead but no body was found. Then the mayor of L.A. poured $14 million into reviving a derelict area, and a gala do was held at the theatre, in which Moon had taken refuge. A starlet had her neck snapped but Danny said it wasn't The Terror to please the mayor and prevent copycat killings.
   Kate started having her baby. The cop staking out the theatre at Danny's request shed his radio & gun before doing some running; and ran into The Terror. Danny got part way into Moon's secret, then he spotted his hideout when looking at the theatre's plans. So he steamed in.
   Det. Mike to him to wait for back-up. Danny & Moon had a battle in almost complete darkness, so not much to be seen most of the time. The Terror took a dive through a skylight, and The Hero ended up marrying his shrink.

High Plains Invaders (2009) is a sciffy Western set in 1882. A bloke at a mine with a Heath Robinson extraction system is marmalyzed. In the nearby town, Avaranth, Colorado, Sam is about to be hanged, there's a homicidal female bounty hunter drinking the place dry and Jules, the mine owner, is trying to recruit new help.
   A big, ugly bug monster turns up for the lynching; cue a shambles. Sam, the outlaw, feeds it some dynamite. More monsters arrive and the survivors hole up in the gaol. The bugs dig lots of big holes. Sam tries to blow them all up. The stupid sheriff gets himself and the storekeeper killed.
   A spaceship full of bugs arrives! Jules, the mine owner, decides they're after the uranium he's mining; it's like a narcotic for them. He thinks it's his fault they're in town and killing people. He makes a bug trap in the woods and Sam kills one.
   Rose, the bounty hunter, wants to run. Sam wants to stand and fight. Jules wants to use his uranium to lure the bugs to the centre of town to blow them up. Rose and another outlaw try to steal the uranium but they're too stupid to stay alive.
   Jules, shot, takes it upon himself to blow up the bugs while Sam and Dr. Abigail ride off to a new life. Even the spaceship is blown up.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) is a remake of the highly successful radio show and the British TV version.
   A dolphin display and a crap theme tune to start. They've made Ford Prefect black (and looking a bit like Huggy Bear) for no apparent reason. The incidental music is a heavy diluted version of the original scores for the radio & TV versions. Stephen Fry ain't no Peter Jones as The Book, the graphics of which are surprisingly crude.
   The Vogon's aren't bad. Zaphod Beeblebrox doesn't have 2 heads? Yes, there's another lurking, and so is his third arm. Marvin is a midget which is mostly head and looks like one of Darth Vader's white plastic armoured soldiers, which has shrunk in the wash.
   The script has been messed about a lot and some new stuff has been stuck in, presumably to stretch it to 100 minutes. So the guys end up on Vogsphere, rescueing Trisha, instead of going directly to Megrathea. They do a walk-by of the original Marvin on Vogsphere. The back to the script, the Earth rebuilt, but they've mucked up the ending.

Hitman (2007) There is a CIA-sponsored outfit, which works behind the scenes all over the world, kidnapping children, shaving them bald, tattooing a bar code on the back of their head and training them as killers. One of them captured Inspector Mike of Interpol to tell him that he was the man Mike had been chasing for 3 years.
   Jump back in time to when the killer was spotted in St. Petersburg. Belikov, the Russian bossman, screwed with the assassin, who survived betrayal to the FSB, who told Inspector Mike to get lost. The Russians tried to pretend that Belikov had survived an assassination attempt when he'd been killed and replaced by a surgical look-alike.
   The assassin kidnapped Belikov's $300 slavegirl; he was planning to finish the Belikov job and get some answers. He took out an older assassin from the same stable and then a bunch of skinheads of his own age. Inspector Mike's assistant worked out that Belikov had been replaced.
   The assassin told the slavegirl that he was No. 47. Having killed Belikov's arms-dealer brother, he planned to take out the double at the state funeral. 47 grabbed Belikov in the cathedral and took him out. Inspector Mike was allowed to bust the assassin but the CIA ambushed him and strolled off with the prisoner. Back in the present, 47 gave Insp. Mike a body and proof that he'd nailed the super-killer, then 47 headed back to St. Pete.

The Hive (2007) A meteor hits a South-East Asian island, turning the local ants into a killer mob. Thorax is called in to stick it to the ants over the objections of Dr. Clare, who believes the ants have become self-aware and shouldn't be killed. The ants fight back and one of them invades Bill's head. But they are stopped eventually.
   A new swarm of 200 million ants, 3x bigger than the last one, can form ant tentacles! And it includes lots of species instead of just one. Bill & Cortez are lured into a trap and Cortez is eaten. The ants then invade the Thorax base camp. Then they let the bug guy & Dr. Clare know they want to talk; they demand the island.
   The human government says 'No way!' even though the ants have a young girl prisoner. They can have part of the island or be nuked! Crazy Bill goes into the ants' lair with his boss & Dr. Clare. He's got a bomb, so that's it for the ants and the alien controlling them heads back into space.
   The local bosses decide, "Nothing happened here. No alien, no spaceship. We will protect the people by telling them nuffink."

The Hollow Man (2000, Kevin Bacon) A mad scientist was able to make animals invisible but "reversion" was a problem. Suddenly, he found he'd cracked it, he told Lynn, his ex-wife, and showed her a molecular model to prove it. Some red stuff made the gorilla visible again, but it was a painful business needing the electric shock machine. His Committee, which doled out the cash, was getting impatient, so Sebastian decided to start the human testing with himself.
   He got naked for a dose of blue stuff and 3 days of invisibility, but why he couldn't keep his clothes on remains a mystery. Seb did some spying and molesting. The red stuff didn't bring him back. Seb went walkabout from the lab, after rigging the thermal CCTV camera, and molested the woman living opposite him.
   Seb was too jealous to appreciate the efforts of Matt, the team member who had taken up with Lynn, and he went stir crazy. He chucked a brick through Lynn's window and killed a yappy dog at the lab. Then he drowned his former professor, who was in charge of the oversight committee, after Lynn ratted him out.
   Seb trapped the team in the lab and started killing them as they tried to hunt him down. Lynn and Matt got themselves locked in a freezer for a while. Lynn used a flame-thrower on Seb, who electrocuted himself. But he returned to the attack as Lynn and Matt were climbing up the lift-shaft. But this was his last bit of fun before he was sent to Hell.

The Hollow Man 2 (2006) A drunken doctor causing scenes at a posh do at the Reisner Institute? No, someone invisible is assaulting him and kills him. The invisible guy wants someone to make "the buffer". The military takes over the crime scene, turfing out the local Seattle cops. The boss of the institute gets 2 detectives, Frank Turner & Lisa Martinez, to guard Dr. Maggie Dalton. Martinez is killed by the invisible guy.
   The army crashes in but the killer gets away. Turner helps Dr. Dalton to escape from the military. She tells him about the invisibility programme, which killed the test subjects. She invented the buffer to keep them alive. The system was tried on a special forces guy called Michael Griffin but he died and Dalton was sacked. She believes that Griffin faked his death and he'll be dead soon with out the buffer. The military want him dead right away.
   Another survivor from the programme tells Dalton that Griffin never got the buffer and Operation Silent Night was about political, not national, security – political assassination by an invisible man.
   Griffin grabs Dr. Dalton. Turner has to make himself invisible to avoid being done in by SWAT. He blags a dose of buffer from Reisner, who is conveniently wiped out in traffic. Turner shoves Griffin out of a window to save Dalton. That doesn't see Griffin off but Turner finishes the job with a shovel. At the end, he's still invisible and a lurking figure in a hood outside the hospital where Dr. Dalton ended up.

Hollywood Homicide (2003) is a comedy starring Harrison Ford, who looks much too old to be Joe, a working cop, who does real estate on the side. Joe & his young partner, K.C., who wants to be an actor instead of a cop, investigate the slaying of a bunch of rappers. (What's the crime? Ed.) Joe is trying to shift a millstone of a house, in which all his assets are tied up.
   The assassins are capped by a cop working for the club's security firm. Benny Mako of Internal Affairs is causing trouble for Joe & K.C. because Joe embarrassed him 2 years before and Joe is having an affair with Benny's ex (Lena Olin). Joe & the kid bust a gut busting a suspect, who's almost wiped out in a drive-by shooting.
   K.C.'s mom says the rappers were being ripped off by Mr. Surtain, their producer, and killed as a warning to other potential deserters. The kid's dad was killed on an undercover operation involving the dirty cops Wasley & Benny. Joe & K.C. are busted but make fools of their interrogators. Joe keeps getting calls about a major real estate deal while chasing Surtain all over the place.
   K.C. gets to do some acting before blowing some (non-lethal) holes in Wasley. Meanwhile, Joe traps Surtain on a roof and chucks him off into a dumpster. Benny is busted while trying to bust Joe & K.C., and the kid gets to do some ham acting at the end.

Homefront (2013, Jason Statham) Big drug bust, gung-ho shooting and Agent Croker walked away in disgust after a biker BG was lit up. He and his daughter ended up in a town full of psycho rednecks. The most psycho was the local meth cooker. He invaded Croker's happy home to slash tyres and burgle the joint. He saw a big business opportunity in shopping the former undercover Fed to major biker dealers.
   The handyman warned Croker that the meth guy had it in for him and he had the sheriff in his pocket. Croker did some card-marking snooping and got caught. So he wrecked the BGs. The bikers turned up as he was getting his daughter out of the way. A big battle and the daughter was kidnapped by the psycho's crazy wife.
   Cathy, the psycho's sister, blew up the meth factory and got herself shot up a bit by the psycho when she tried to protect the kid. So Croker kicked the psycho's ass but didn't completely kill him so he could enjoy some gaol time.

Hooper (1978, Burt Reynolds) A middle-aged stuntman, who gets along on pain-killers, feels unappreciated then the 'Young Sonny Hooper' hits town. The kid (Jan-Michael Vincent) parachutes in to a benefit do to get himself noticed. There's a huge battle in a club afterwards. Roger, the director of Hooper's film, gives Ski, the kid, a stunt.
   Hooper's doctor tells him his spine is shot and he could end up paralysed or even dead. Roger puts more stunts into the script. Hooper & the kid come up with the World's Biggest Gag. Jacko (Brian Keith), the guy Hooper replaced and the father of Hooper's girlfriend (Sally Field) ends up in hospital after a stroke as an awful warning.
   Hooper decides to quit after the big stunt. Then he calls it off, but not for long, so his girlfriend says goodbye, but she's back on set for the finale of the film. Sonny & Ski drive through mayhem and make the 300-foot jump in their rocket car. Then Hooper decks Roger.

Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2009) A Detroit detective with a totally useless son, it's winter, and a killer leaves someone's teeth on a salver on a frozen pond with messages on nearby trees. The crime scene is found; it's the work of more than one whack job. Another body; a bloke; and there's a girl tied up in a cupboard.
   The 2 bodies were both strung up with suspension rigs. The detective finds that someone commissioned 4 of them. Our detective realizes he has religious nutters on his hands and the crimes are all about the 4 nutty horsemen of the poke a' chips.
   The girl 'rescued' at the 2nd crime scene is one of them. The cops try to bust another nutter but he gets away and the apartment goes up in flames. One of the nutters stabs a mugger, who helps the cops to identify him. The kid suspends his brother then kills himself. The detective tells his boss he thinks the 4 horsenutters are going to create Hell on Earth – tomorrow!
   The detective makes a group therapy link and realizes that his son went to the same therapist. The crazy son slugs his dad, handcuffs him and commits suicide. But nothing terrible happens. So much for the Apocalypse.

Hot Fuzz (2007) PC Nicholas Angel was so successful in the Met that he was promoted to sergeant and then sent out to the wilds of Gloucestershire because his arrest record showed up the uselessness of the other plods in the Met. Sandford was full of drunken yobs, underage drinkers, public urinaters and drunken drivers; one of whom was a copper and the boss copper's son.
   There was a double decapitation dressed up as a road accident. There was a crazy farmer with lots of guns and a sea mine. Then a huge fire and another death. Angel was deflected onto the churce fete; and there was a murder by a bit of church dropped from a great height.
   The local cops tried to pass it off as another accident. Angel came up with a land scam and found that the village was full of a cult, like Satanists but dedicated to winning the Best Village Competition. He was run out of town but he found a way to fight back. Cue a huge shoot-out. The bad guy had a terrible accident in the model village and his accomplice; PC Danny's dad, drove into a tree whilst being harassed by a swan. And Angel turned down a chance to go back to London.

Hot Shots! (1991) Airplane meets Top Gun meets Police Squad meets Police Academy. The US navy wants Topper Harley (Charlie Sheen) back for a top-secret mission after chucking him out. Lloyd Bridges play an admiral without 2 brain cells to rub together. Topper falls for the French shrink, who thinks he should be grounded, and she's the girlfriend of another pilot, who blames Topper's dad for his father's death. Washout and Dead Meat are also on the roster.
   There's an aircraft manufacturer up to no good. Lots of stunts and general silly antics, then Topper leads the big mission. He drops a bomb into Saddam's lap and takes out a nucular plant with enemy missles, which were following him. Then it's back to the Indian reservation, where Topper hangs out, and a happy ending with the shrink.

Hot Shots Part Deux (1993, Charlie Sheen, Lloyd Bridges) A top secret operation to rescue prisoners from Desert Storm and kill Saddam Insane runs into an ambush. The klutzish President Benson is up for re-election and sabotage is suspected. Only Topper Harley can save the day. He's doing prize fights in Thailand and Michelle of the CIA is chucked at him.
   Topper and his team parachute into the jungles of Iraq. His contact there, Ramada, tells him she's married. Her husband is one of the prisoners. There's a one-all draw with an Iraqi patrol boat on the Mekong river. Topper, in a Rambo outfit, & Co. deploy a range of weird weapons at the prison camp.
   The President launches his own rescue mission. Topper's body count soars as the prisoners are rescued. Topper & the Pres. engage in single combat with Saddam, who goes to pieces for a while, like a Terminator. Michelle is busted for sabotage. Ramada gets her Mr. Bean husband back, but he falls over a cliff. And a piano falls on Saddam Insane.

House of Flying Daggers (2004) The Tang dynasty is crumbling and the Robin Hood-style Flying Dagger bandits are stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Police chief Leo sends Captain Jin undercover at a house of ill repute, where he meets Mia, a blind dancer. She's a Flying Dagger and she won't say who the new leader is (the old leader having been killed). Jin rescues Mia from police custody and she says she's the old leader's daughter.
   Jin & Mia run into solders who don't know Jin is a copper and a big battle ensues. Someone who isn't a Flying Dagger lends a hand; Leo. He tells Jin that the General sent the extra troops and there are more ahead, so Jin quits his job. Then Mia dumps him. She ends up fighting the Bamboo Squad, Jin joins in and they both end up captured. But loads of flying daggers take out the soldiers.
   The lady brothel-keeper turns out to be the new leader of the Flying Daggers. Leo & Jin end up prisoners. But Leo is a flying-dagger mole! And he's in love with Mia but she has fallen for Jin. She lets Jin go when told to kill him, so Leo gives her a flying dagger. Then he tries to put the blame for killing Mia on Jin, like a typical Labour politician.
   It starts snowing as the General's men approach, Leo & Jin have a huge battle, Mia, who isn't quite dead, kills herself in an attempt to persuade Leo not to kill Jin, but everyone looks doomed from blood-loss and hypothermia.

The Hunger Games (2012) In a weird, North Korean-style society, each of 12 districts has to send a young woman and a young man, teenagers and mere children, to compete in the annual games by killing one another for the delectation of a world-wide TV audience until there is just one survivor. This is the revenge of the metropolitan class on the peasants for a revolt 3 generations earlier.
   A girl in district 12 volunteers to save her baby sister and the boy from there fancies her. They are picked by a pink-clad weirdo female impersonator, and taken to the big city, where the public faces of the games are all clinically insane Monty Python characters in fright wigs.
   The tributes get 4 days' instruction then they're tipped into the woods to kill or be killed, with a cannon going off every time someone croaks. The assholes in the control room toss obstacles in their path. Predictably, it looks like the 2 from district 12 will survive, so the rules are changes to allow 2 winners if they're from the same district to play the young love card.
   Natch, our heroes are told, when they become the last 2 standing, that the rule change has been revoked. So the girl offers poisonous berries to the lad to frustrate the Big Boss. So Kim Jong Whoever unrevokes the rule, and lets the guy in charge of the Games know that his suicide by poisonous berries is obligatory.
   Not a film that anyone could take seriously.

The Hunted (2003) starts in Kosovo in 1999. Serbs are murdering Albanians and a US special forces team goes in to kill a Serb commander. Switch to British Columbia where L.T. (Tommy Lee Jones) frees a white wolf from a snare and clobbers the guy who set it. Switch to Silver Falls, Ontario in 2003. Two deer hunters run into a guy with a knife, who takes them out. It's Aaron Hallam, the kid who took out the Serb.
   The FBI brings in L.T. to hunt down Hallam. They get into a punch up and the kid is shot by a female FBI agent with a dart gun and taken to Portland. The army turns up to claim the kid, who 'doesn't exist'. Of course, the kid escapes and, of course, L.T. goes after him. But first, a flashback to L.T.'s training programme for killers.
   A big chase through Portland by car and electric train takes a break while the protagonists make some weapons out of readily available materials. L.T. does some body-surfing through white-water rapids before their final encounter. Of course, the kid ends up dead. But the white wolf is still lurking around L.T.'s cabin.

Hunter Prey (2010) A crashed spaceship, guys in comical armour under fire and led by Commander Carver. They have to retrieve the escaped prisoner alive or no ride home. Gulp! The guards are aliens made of pale blue clay and the prey is the last of its kind because the clay people have destroyed its home world and the creature wants to replay the favour.
   Surprise! The prisoner is human! He mugs Carver, the last surviving guard, and strolls off with his gear, so they can chat to each other as the clock winds down to rescue. A ship arrives and the human is darted and captured. It's a green clay bounty hunter.
   The human legs it while the clay aliens are scrapping but he doesn't get far. Jericho, the human, tells Carver that a cloaked ship is on the way to take out his home world. But it's all part of a scam to get the home world's location.
   Surprise! The bomb ship is on the planet where the prison transport crashed! And Jericho needed to find out where to aim it.

The Hunters (2013) Three artefact bandits in Thailand? No, 2 Hunter (a married couple) and a treacherous woman working for the guy who wants the 4 shards. Her double-cross got Mason Fuller only. Two guys claiming to be from Interpol dropped in on the Hunters' 2 sons. The younger saw right through them. A girl called Dylan dropped in to help the Flynn kids put the boguses to flight.
   Dylan told them Hunters track down artefacts like Aladin's Lamp and the Golden Fleece, and she's one of them – so the Warehouse 13 plot. The trio found their way into the parents' "Hub" at the house. The spy lady thought the kids would lead her to the other shards. The kids did Indiana Jones stuff to find 2 shard vases.
   The kids called Fuller, who's supposed to be a family friend, to be extracted from the back of beyond. They went after the Glass Slipper. Dylan realized that Fuller was a bad guy as they were stealing it at a museum. Mom extracted the kids. Dad had disappeared. Mom knew where the mirror is. Fuller didn't but his spy lady did.
   Mason put the 4 shards into the mirror and he was turned to stone and dropped to bits!! Then Mom told the mirror to destroy itself and it took Fuller's castle with it. Then Mom and the kids headed off to Peru to do more Hunting.

Hydra (2009) A bunch of treasure hunters on a volcanic island are eaten by a 3-headed monster! Then a ship arrives with 4 of the world's richest men. They've all had someone killed by a criminal, so there are 4 criminals aboard for them to hunt. The original island picked for the hunt has disappeared but the captain of the ship finds Hydra island.
   2 crewmen sent to check out the island are eaten. The criminals get a 24-hour head start, but they've all been implanted with GPS trackers. One of them, Nolan, is ex-special forces; he left the ship's captain for dead for being an evil bastard. The captain doesn't tell his boss when 2 more crewmen disappear.
   A hunter kills one of the criminals then one of the treasure hunters dashes through the group with the Hydra on her tail. It eats the hunter. The boss tries to call off the hunt when he discovers that Nolan is a special forces psycho. The treasure hunter lady offers to help the others if they'll help her to kill the Hydra.
   The volcano becomes violent. Nolan plucks a Vorpal sword from a lava tube and hacks the heads off the monster (which grew more when Hercules did it; the trick is to cut the heads off then burn the stump). Nolan takes over the ship, which the Hydra invades. But Nolan slays it completely with just the Vorpal sword after it has eaten all the bad guys.

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